head to head · open source
cilium vs OpenObserve
cilium has 25,232 GitHub stars, 4,071 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. OpenObserve has 21,993 stars, 1,091 forks, 598 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium leads on adoption by 15% (25,232 vs 21,993 stars). cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0; OpenObserve is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. cilium has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, OpenObserve 5%. OpenObserve was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| cilium | OpenObserve | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 22K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick cilium if
- You weight community size — 25K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick OpenObserve if
- You want the OpenObserve feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and OpenObserve fits your workflow better
About cilium
Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution built on an eBPF based dataplane, written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0. It lives in the Kubernetes ecosystem as a CNI implementation, and it is a CNCF project. At its foundation is eBPF, a Linux kernel technology that allows dynamic insertion of bytecode at integration points such as network IO, application sockets, and tracepoints, which is where Cilium implements its networking, security, and visibility logic. The project provides a flat Layer 3 network that can span multiple clusters in either native routing or overlay mode, and it is L7 proto…
read the full cilium overview →
About OpenObserve
OpenObserve is an open source observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, analytics, Real User Monitoring, session replay, pipelines, SLO, and LLM observability. It lives in the cloud native infrastructure ecosystem and is described as an alternative to Datadog, Splunk, and Elasticsearch. The project is built in Rust, ships as a single binary, and uses Parquet columnar storage with an S3 native design.
read the full OpenObserve overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cilium or OpenObserve more popular?
cilium has 25,232 GitHub stars and OpenObserve has 21,993. cilium has the larger community by that measure.
Are cilium and OpenObserve free?
Both are open source. cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0 and OpenObserve under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cilium and OpenObserve?
cilium is written in Go and OpenObserve in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, cilium or OpenObserve?
Choose cilium if you want the larger community (25,232 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose OpenObserve if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.